Are Insects Conscious?: The surprisingly sophisticated mind of an insect

If insects are conscious, how should humans treat them? Take agricultural pesticides. Anything that causes mass suffering and death in its intended victims is problematic.

CARRIE ARNOLD: A growing collection of new experiments is challenging the old consensus. Far from being six-legged automatons, insects can experience feelings akin to pain and suffering, joy and desire. When Lars Chittka, a sensory and behavioral ecologist at Queen Mary University of London, gave bumblebees an extra jolt of sucrose, their favorite food, the bees buzzed with delight. Agitated, anxious honeybees, on the other hand, responded with pessimism when researchers shook them to simulate a predatory attack.

Other researchers found that they “scream” when under threat. Ants display rudimentary counting abilities, can understand the concept of zero and make tools. Fruit flies learn from their peers. Cockroaches have complex social lives. Fruit flies drown themselves in booze when deprived of mating opportunities. Some earwigs and other insects play dead when threatened by a predator.

In other words, insects have thoughts and feelings. The next question for philosophers and scientists alike is: Do they have consciousness?.. Nearly 400 years ago, the French philosopher and polymath René Descartes formulated a devastatingly simple answer to the question, “What is consciousness?” Cogito, ergo sum —I think, therefore I am. Hidden in that three-word Latin phrase is the assumption that humans are the only thinking animals…

Cutting-edge research over the last few years has begun to shift this view. “Humans are no longer seen as at the pinnacle of creation,” Catherine Wilson, a philosophy fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, told me. “There’s a greater modesty and awareness in which we are just one species — and maybe not even the most important species.”

To Wilson, the biological basis of consciousness arises from the separation of self from the world. “Animals need to know what their movements are and what is happening in the world,” she said. That gives rise to an experience, which is the fundamental building block of consciousness…

Whereas Descartes could claim that human consciousness was a gift of the divine, modern scientists and philosophers don’t treat consciousness as if it were miraculously bestowed upon the world, all neatly tied up with a big red bow. Consciousness, then, is a natural phenomenon, not a religious one.

That meant consciousness had to have a biological explanation. That explanation immediately focused on the brain. To Descartes and like-minded philosophers, consciousness is inextricably linked to the human mind… The swollen cortex of a person controls many of the features that we typically consider make us human: things like rational thought, awareness and language…

Despite their reputation as mindless automatons, insects have three blobs of neural tissue that, taken together, form a brain. What insects don’t have is a cortex — nothing that even resembles one. To Hill, this means they can’t have consciousness. Without this dense, gray lid of neurons, consciousness is just not possible.

Other researchers aren’t so sure. They have begun to question whether consciousness originates from a place at all, spurring a rethinking of why it exists in the first place… if consciousness evolved, then maybe the cortex isn’t the be-all, end-all of consciousness. Maybe consciousness is far more primitive. Insects might lack the hardware called a cerebral cortex, but they have plenty of other neural real estate. Could their brains perhaps contain the basis of consciousness?…

Colin Klein, a philosopher, and Andy Barron, who studies the neural mechanisms of animals, then both working at Macquarie University in Sydney, met at a science pub night. They had a pint and struck up a conversation on what researchers call the neural correlates of consciousness.

In the beginning, they agreed that insects were not conscious. But as they talked, they started to punch holes in their assumptions. They remembered that, in 2007, the Swedish neuroscientist Björn Merker argued that consciousness didn’t originate in the highly advanced cortex, but in a more primitive section of the brain at the top of the brain stem.

Klein and Barron honed in on one part of that area, the tongue-shaped segment of neurons about an inch long called the midbrain, which controls a variety of involuntary functions, such as vision and motor control, as well as processing some sensory input. It was this latter task that attracted Merker’s attention for its potential role in consciousness…

Klein and Barron found Merker’s argument compelling — and if it was true, insects might very well be conscious. In a 2016 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they argued that insects do have the functional equivalent of the human midbrain, which means they could very likely have some form of consciousness…

Not many people believed the conclusion, Klein told me. A big mistake, he pointed out, is thinking that insect consciousness is like human consciousness… But consciousness itself, Klein says, is much deeper and more primitive. It’s a sense of yourself in the world. It’s suffering. It’s bliss. It’s hard to get more primitive than pain and pleasure. Even bacteria know kinds of pain and pleasure — they are hardwired to swim toward some signals but away from others. So do fish. And insects.

But so what? If insects have consciousness, what does that even mean? A moral philosopher who has pondered this question is Peter Singer. Singer stopped eating meat in the late 1960s as a student at Oxford University, after a friend told him about the abuse of animals in the meat industry. Singer’s 1975 book “Animal Liberation” — widely considered to be the founding philosophy of the animal rights movement — laid bare the problems of overlooking suffering in everything from scientific research to food.

But at first, insects weren’t on his radar. “I was always unsure about invertebrates, such as cephalopods and crustaceans,” he told me. “I wasn’t thinking very much about it. I was just hoping that they weren’t sentient and there wasn’t an issue there.” Over the years, however, Singer has continued to ask himself about the nature of animal suffering and what enables it, biologically. He has come to the same conclusion as Klein and Chittka: that insects do have some sort of consciousness.

But Singer takes it one step further: If insects are conscious, how should humans treat them? Take agricultural pesticides. Anything that causes mass suffering and death in its intended victims is problematic, he said, because whether or not those victims are conscious, they can feel pain. Thus, farmers should use whichever one causes insects to immediately lose consciousness — “the equivalent of a humane slaughter law.”

I asked Singer if there was some sort of suffering math that could be calculated. If, say, a cricket is one-tenth as conscious as a chicken and can thus only suffer one-tenth as much, but it requires 100 crickets to get the same protein as a chicken, would we then be increasing the suffering in the universe by an order of magnitude? Singer paused for a minute, then nodded. “Maybe,” he said. It’s not that simple, he went on, but it’s something most governments should be thinking about, and they aren’t.

Most, but not all. Last November, the British government recognized crustaceans and cephalopods (octopi and squid) as sentient, and proposed legislation would make it illegal to boil lobsters alive. There are already laws barring the same cooking method in Switzerland and elsewhere…

The question worth asking is: What is it like to be a bee or an ant? We lose little by elbowing humans out of the center of every decision-making process, instead asking how our actions impact other animals, even small ones we think are dumb and gross. As Wilson put it: “We are living, suffering and enjoying beings in a whole world of other living, suffering and enjoying beings. And we should not be depriving them unnecessarily of their experiences”. SOURCE…

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